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#100hardtruthsMain MenuPledges and lists written over the first 100 daysA path through the primer focusing on the several pledges and lists of hardtruths I wrote during the first 100 days of the Trump administration24 #100hardtruths authored by invited contributorsA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths written by scholars, artists, activists, and friendsArt Answers to Phony QuestionsA path through the primer focusing on speaking hardtruths about and through poetic, abstract, formally reflexive, non-indexical Art FormsVirality is VirilityA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that connect a macho growing of digital stature to real world violenceFake News R UsA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that reveal our complicitySome #100hardtruths on Digital Media LiteracyA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about reading, writing, participating and understanding Digital Media LiteracySome #100hardtruths on RacismA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about ethnicity, nationality, zenophobia, immigration and racismSome #100hardtruths on SexismA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about gender, sexuality, sexism, and misogynySome #100hardtruths on ImagesA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about photography, visibiity, and the power of imagesSome #100hardtruths on the LawA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about legislation, (il)legality, public institutions, and the power of the LawSome #100hardtruths on AdvertisingA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about corporate greed, getting eyeballs to content, the monetization of the Internet and AdsSome #100hardtruths of the InternetA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths that attempt to reveal the structure, logic, uses and power of the InternetSome #100hardtruths on Freedom of ExpressionA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about journalism, freedom of speech, and the power of ExpressionSome #100hardtruths on and through Film and VideoA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about or spoken through film and video35 #100hardtruths highlighting the work of othersA path through the primer focusing on hardtruths produced by journalists, scholars, artists, activists found onlineCreditsAbout the makers of this Scalar book.Old home page that links to WordpressSome #100hardtruths in poetryPoems that were produced as a result of radical digital media literacy workshopsAlexandra Juhaszf60e7beb550e75bc077d6722b27684bbbb62d0deXiomara Liana Rodrigueze692622823dfcb5652df57e66962e293d1913569Craig Dietrich2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490

#85, make productive fake documentaries

12017-10-23T18:32:49+00:00Xiomara Liana Rodrigueze692622823dfcb5652df57e66962e293d19135691599April 11, 2017plain2017-12-17T18:51:00+00:00Xiomara Liana Rodrigueze692622823dfcb5652df57e66962e293d1913569In an article, “The Increasingly Unproductive Fake,” I wrote about The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), I film that I produced and also acted in: “We took up fake documentary form in The Watermelon Woman to make many related claims about history: history is untrue, true history is irretrievable, and fake histories can be real. Dunye (both as director of The Watermelon Woman and as doppelganger character in the film, the African-American lesbian, “Cheryl,” who is making a documentary film) knows that before she came along, African-Americans, women, and lesbians did make films—in and out of Hollywood. She also knows that their presence, unrecorded and unstudied, passed quickly out of history becoming unavailable even as she craves ancestors to authorize and situate her voice. So, Dunye fakes the history of a formidable forerunner, Fae “The Watermelon Woman” Richards, so that she can tell a story that she, Cheryl, needs to know, one that is close to true, and yet also faked, and therefore at once beyond but also linked to reality and all that the real authorizes and disguises.”“Marlon Fuentes reminds us that the gaps and ellipses of history are ‘just as important as the objects we have in our hands.’ The intangible is not inarticulate: it speaks in an unauthorized, untranslated tongue understood by some. In The Watermelon Woman, Fae speaks to Cheryl in a voice both expressive and inconclusive. And Cheryl can hear her. This is enough to empower Cheryl, at film’s end, to conclude, “I am a black lesbian filmmaker and I have a lot to say.” She learns a truth that she needs from the lie that she made which is Fa(k)e.”“Dunye and Cheryl’s simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the real marks The Watermelon Woman as a productive fake. An (unstable) identity is created, a community (of skeptics) is built, and an (unresolved) political statement about black lesbian history and identity is articulated. The desire to say and hear something true through words and images that are fragmentary and even fake is the multiple project of the productive fake documentary.”“In much more recent writing, I argue that the language of fake documentary has become the dominant vernacular of YouTube, and therefore, this once queer strategy has become toothless, or unqueer, or straight. Whatever. The ironic wedge, sometimes also known as camp, which long and well served the under-served of the modern and post-modern by allowing for a critique of the norm by using its very discourses of power against it, is now the discourse of power. But, to be productively queer was never simply to copy and mock, even marked with a funny or flouncy flourish or a some serious realness, it was always to do so with an actual change in mind. And all this is to say, in conclusion, something simple, sad, and maybe even hard to hear: that perhaps the self-conscious, self-aware, self-evident copy-with-a-twist is no longer queer at all, no longer productive, and all that is left is to be real.”

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12018-01-09T11:28:44+00:00Alexandra Juhaszf60e7beb550e75bc077d6722b27684bbbb62d0deSome #100hardtruths on and through Film and VideoCraig Dietrich7A path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about or spoken through film and videostructured_gallery2018-03-01T23:25:45+00:00Craig Dietrich2d66800a3e5a1eaee3a9ca2f91f391c8a6893490

12018-01-09T10:40:42+00:00Alexandra Juhaszf60e7beb550e75bc077d6722b27684bbbb62d0deSome #100hardtruths on ImagesAlexandra Juhasz5A path through the primer focusing on hardtruths about photography, visibiity, and the power of imagesplain2018-01-09T13:50:03+00:00Alexandra Juhaszf60e7beb550e75bc077d6722b27684bbbb62d0de